Living in the shadow of Gmail, Reader and Calendar's got to be tough, but that's what a slew of useful Google products do every day. We give Google's front-running applications a lot of ink (or pixels, as it were), and the rest a passing mention in the fast-flowing river of news. Today's top 10 pays homage to the little brother and sister Google products that you forgot all about.
1. Google Code Search
Mostly of interest only to programmers,Google Code Search is a pretty incredible mechanism for finding and browsing the innards of countless open source projects. Use the
lang: operator to limit your results to a certain language, and search by developer name, file name, or comments. Here's a search for the words "nasty hack" in PHP code—lang:PHP nasty hack—and here's a search for Javascript authored by Gmail Macros developer Mihai Parparita.2. Google Base
Easily publish and find recipes, classifieds, vacation rentals and job listings at Google Base, a no-web site way to get data online and into Google's search results. What's great about Base is that it offers data type-specific search operators. For example, you can search recipes by ingredient, or vacation rentals by location and features like how many bedrooms, and what type of property it is (cabin, cottage, hotel, villa, house, etc.)
3. Google Trends
Compare the "world's interest" in certain words and topics at Google Trends, which charts the number of times a word or phrase appeared on the web over time. Great for checking out the history of popular neologisms and brand names (like iPhone or lifehacker), you can also pit terms against one another. You can see from the image above that the phrase "getting things done" has been around a lot longer than the word "lifehacker." (Pit GTD vs lifehacker at Google Trends.)4. Google Alerts
Make your web search results come to you with Google Alerts, email notifications that list the new web pages your search terms pop up on, real-time. Google Alerts automatically hands me Lifehacker story ideas every morning, and it's also great to ego search your own name, web site title or product name, too. To get results for several term searches in one alert, separate them with a pipe (|) or combine terms with AND, like wildfire AND "San Diego".5. Google Book Search
Remember those rectangular objects that you used to read by turning a page from one side to the other? Ah, those were the days. You can still get your books online at Google Book Search, whose book-scanning elves add to the digital library all the time. Flip through pages of the books scanned into Book Search, and add books to your personal virtual library as well. Along those same lines, academics won't want to forget about Google Scholar for searching papers, theses, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.6. Google Page Creator
When Aunt Martha and Uncle Skip ask how to set up a web page? Point 'em to Google Page Creator, a totally web-based, WYSIWYG web site creation tool that hosts up to 100MB of files for free.4. Google Notebook
We all find snippets of web pages, quotes, and images all over the web we want to copy to a personal library, and Google Notebook is a powerful way to do just that. Whether you're researching a particular project, capturing ideas as you come across them online, or Getting Things Done, Notebook (especially coupled with its companion Firefox extension) is a powerful, useful tool.3. Flight Simulator in Google Earth
Ok, so Google doesn't make a flight simulator, but they do hide one in the latest version of Google Earth. Download Google Earth 4.2, and to enter flight sim mode, hit Ctrl+Alt+A (Mac users: Cmd+Opt+A), choose your plane, airport and runway. Google Earth's flight simulator isn't a walk in the park for newbs, so here's more info on how to take off and navigate the friendly, virtual skies.2. Keyboard Shortcuts Experimental Web Search
Hidden deep in the bowels of Google Labs is the Keyboard Shortcuts flavor of web search, which takes your mouse out of web search entirely. Once you're using Keyboard Shortcuts search (just add "&esrch=BetaShortcuts" to your Google URLs), use J and K to move up and down a search results list. Open a link using O or the Enter key; bring your cursor to the search box using / (forward slash), and Esc to get out of the search box. Here, install the keyboard shortcuts version of Google search into Firefox or IE7's built-in search box for easy access.7. SketchUp
Free 3-D modeling program Google SketchUp lets anyone virtually architect their dream house, remodeled kitchen, office, spaceship or skyscraper. Download Google SketchUp for free, for Mac or PC.
This was a tough list to winnow down, asGoogle's full product list is long and prodigious. In fact, we're still having regrets about leaving Patent Search, Google Moon, and Google Mars off the list. Update: I'm particularly regretful about not includingGrand Central or Google SMS, too.
8. Page Speed
With Google search now factoring in a website’s loading time in an effort to improve user experience, it’s now more essential than ever to analyze your site for places where you can trim the fat and expose issues that you can fix to speed it up.
Page Speed is an open source Firebug browser add-on that helps you evaluate the performance of your web pages. Factors assessed by the add-on are based off Google’s Web Performance Best Practices, spearheaded by highly respected ex-Yahoo! Chief Performance and current Google executive, Steve Souders.
9. Google Ajax Libraries API
Most websites take advantage of using JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery and MooTools for creating Ajax-enabled web apps. But serving these libraries can give your web server a beating, especially if your website generates a lot of unprimed cache site traffic.
Google Ajax Libraries API is a way of serving popular JavaScript libraries (there are currently 10 popular libraries being offered up) to your site visitors, giving you the chance to offload the burden to Google’s highly capable infrastructure.
Using the Google Ajax Libraries API is advantageous for many reasons, including the reduction of web server bandwidth and resource consumption and a higher chance that your site visitors will hit your web pages with a primed cache because they might have visited another site that uses Google Ajax Libraries previously, producing faster page response times and enhancing their experience.
10. Google App Engine
Google App Engine lets you run your web apps on the company’s infrastructure. What this ultimately translates to is that you can save your dough without sacrificing uptime and server resources. You can still use your web app on your own domain, but if you’re really that strapped for cash, you can use their free domain as well (yourapp.appspot.com).
To get your feet wet quickly, Google devised a practical tutorial on using Google App Engine to build a guest book. Want to see what the Google App Engine can do? Rummage through the Applications Gallery.
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